222 ESSAYS OF A BIOLOGIST 



There is, however, no reason whatever to admit 

 that personality is a genuine characteristic of any 

 knowable God ; but every reason to suspect that it is, 

 as a matter of hard fact, merely another product of 

 this property of projection so strong in the human mind. 



On the other hand, an analysis of religious experi- 

 ence as a phenomenon, as something equally worthy 

 of patient and scientific study as the gas-laws or the 

 methods of evolution, shows that the powers which 

 move in the universe, when organized by thought 

 into a God, are apprehended by the majority of the 

 great mystics and those to whom religious experience 

 has been richly granted as in some way personal. 

 Although, if our line of argument is valid, this will 

 be partly due to a projection of the idea of personality 

 into the idea of God, yet it is clearly in part due to 

 the idea of God being organized by our mental activity 

 to be of the same general type as is a normal personality 

 — as something into which concepts of power, of 

 knowledge, and of feeling and will all enter, with such 

 interconnections between its parts that, like a person- 

 ality, all of its resources are capable of mobilization at 

 any one point. It will be one of the great constructive 

 tasks of psychology to ascertain just how such a concep- 

 tion is organized, and how it operates to produce the 

 experiences, often of overpowering intensity and lasting 

 value, which as a matter of record it often does.^ 



1 See W. James, Varieties of Religious Experience -, E. Under- 

 bill, Essentials of Mysticism. 



